Iranians fleeing cities under attack seek refuge in the countryside

Thursday, 12 March 2026

Iran

Terrified by explosions shaking their homes in Tehran and other cities, tens of thousands of Iranians have packed up and left, finding refuge in small, remote towns to wait out massive bombardment by Israel and the United States.

Pouya Akhgari, 22, is holed up in a family house with aunts and cousins in a village 200km from his home in the capital Tehran. As snow falls in the mountainous countryside of Zanjan province, he mostly spends his days watching movies and TV shows, and sometimes ventures out to the nearest main town.

The village has been spared strikes, but Akhgari's friends in Tehran tell him about the blasts all around them.

“It just feels so chaotic. I thought it’d be very short, but it’s dragging on,” he told The Associated Press by a messaging app. ”If it goes on like this, we’ll run out of money.“

The United Nations refugee agency said that in the first two days of the war, about 100,000 people fled Tehran, a city of around 9.7 million. It said the scale of displacement was probably much higher, though it didn’t have figures for the days since, or on the flight from other cities.

A strawberry farm’s relative safety

A 39-year-old lawyer endured a day of explosions that shook her home in the city of Ahvaz, 800km southeast of Tehran. The next day, on March 2, she packed up her things and hit the road with her brother, sister and their families — and their dogs Coco and Maggie.

They went to their family’s strawberry farm in a small town several hours’ drive away. She and others reached by the AP spoke on condition of anonymity to prevent reprisals, and she asked that the town not be identified.

The town doesn’t have any military bases, so it feels relatively safe. Still, southern Iran has been the target of some of the most intense bombardment. The lawyer said the next town over — which is even smaller — saw an explosion when an air strike hit an ammunition site belonging to the Revolutionary Guard.

She worries that strikes could target a gym used by Guard members a few hundred metres down the road from their farm. Air strikes have hit a number of sports facilities around Iran, apparently because the Guard often uses such sites as gathering places.

No-one is going to work, and the kids are far from school. To pass the time and keep their minds off things, they walk the dogs, play board games, and pick strawberries.

The peacefulness of the nature around them helps to make the war feel distant — the clouds rolling across the green hills, the bleating of their neighbour’s goats at sunset. The brightest spot, the lawyer said, was when one of the two farm dogs, Maya, gave birth to a litter of puppies.

Still, uncertainty hangs over everything.

“From morning to night, we talk about what is happening, our worries, how everything gets more expensive every day, about how far our money will stretch,” she said. “If this situation continues, we will have problems meeting basic needs.”

Between bombardment and the Revolutionary Guard

The US-Israeli campaign has struck heavy blows to Iran’s leadership, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and top military figures. It has also particularly targeted the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard and the all-volunteer Basij force, which are tasked with protecting the cleric-led Islamic Republic. The Basij force has led the crushing of waves of anti-government protests, including ones in January.

The leadership has kept its hold. Khamenei’s son Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei was named the new supreme leader this week. The Guard and Basij have shown that their local networks are still in place so far.

The lawyer said that on the rare times she left the farm to go into town, she saw that members of the Basij were now more heavily armed in the streets. “They are waiting for the slightest movement” showing dissent, she said.

She once campaigned against the mandatory hijab — in fact, she was briefly detained in the past — and stopped wearing it years ago. But since the war, she wears one when she leaves home, for fear of provoking the Basij.

The town was traditionally considered pro-government, she said, and many residents had taken state positions or joined the Guard. Religious and patronage loyalties run deep in rural areas in particular, since the Islamic Republic brought basic services to Iran’s countryside and small towns.

Still, she has seen signs of growing discontent. Large crowds turned out in the town for January’s anti-government protests, she said, and observance of the state’s official mourning week for Khamenei had been muted, with few people wearing black as urged by authorities.

The ‘remarkable kindness’ of strangers

One man described how, before fleeing his home in Tehran, explosions made his 6½-year-old son tremble in fear. “You place him between you and your wife in bed, hoping he might feel safer,” but he still screamed in his sleep. They decided it was time to leave.

As they drove through the capital, they saw cars on the roadside, their windows shattered from blasts. Leaving the city at the foothills of the Alborz Mountains north of Tehran, they saw columns of smoke rising from different parts of the city into the overcast sky. 'The scene made the city look frightening,” he said.

On the highway west out of Tehran, heavy with traffic, explosions shook their car, terrifying his son, the man said. Finally, they reached a family home in a small village on the other side of the mountains northwest of the capital, overlooking the Caspian Sea.

There, they spend their days in the house, surrounded by rice paddies, with snow-capped mountains in the distance. Each day, he and his wife take their son out for walks. “Boys have so much energy, and in a village, there is not much fun for him,” the man said. In the evenings, his wife’s mother and father, who also fled Tehran, visit.

Amid all the chaos, local residents have shown “remarkable kindness”, the man said.

He said he went to the neighbourhood bakery to buy bread, and found a long line. When the baker realised that he wasn’t from the area, he called him to the front of the line, then tried to refuse payment for the bread.

“The others in line were very friendly, asking whether I had a place to stay and whether I needed anything,” he said.

Leaving home isn’t an option for everyone, however.

One 53-year-old man in Tehran said that he couldn’t move his elderly parents, so he was staying home. The strain was immense.

“At night I go down to the parking garage, sit inside my car and scream out loud,” he said. “I pray for calm and for quieter days.”